For Julie Sze, professor of American studies at the University of California-Davis, the fields of environmental justice and environmental humanities are inextricably tied. It's also important to remember, however, that there are many instances in which the two seem incompatible. Her lecture at Hamilton on March 2, titled "Environmental Justice and Environmental Humanities at the Crossroads," explored the relationship between environmental justice and environmental humanities and their implications in the American sociopolitical structure. The lecture was sponsored by the Diversity and Social Justice Project as part of its year-long series on environmental justice.
Sze emphasized that her use of the word "crossroads" in the title of her lecture was intentional. A metaphorical crossroads is exactly what environmental justice and environmental humanities have recently come to. The crossroads is important, symbolically, because it shows that the two fields overlap quite often and have congruities, but at the same time are often seen as incompatible and contradictory. The traditional meaning of crossroads has negative connotations of conflict.
Environmental justice has been around since the 1980s, when both social and environmental activists began talking about "environmental racism," a phenomenon characterized by disproportionate impacts of pollution and government protection on lower classes and minorities. The movement gained momentum in 1994 when an executive order was passed directing that impacts of pollution on minorities had to be examined. Though the discourse on environmental justice has grown considerably of late, the problem is far from being solved. Poor urban neighborhoods are still feeling the effects of pollution worse than the upper and middle classes. Today in New York City, one in four black children have asthma, but the national average for children is only 6 percent.
One of Sze's main goals as an environmental humanist is to increase people's cultural recognition of the environmental problems that plague our society. This is where environmental humanities come into play. Environmental humanities are a window into environmentalism for the layman who doesn't know a lot about the science behind environmentalism. Environmental humanities open environmentalism to a public forum, because the humanities are a social science that has real-life implications that the public can recognize.
One particular study in environmental humanities was done by two pollsters, who called their proposal, "Death of Environmentalism." In "Death of Environmentalism," the two men outlined that in order to move forward, old environmentalism must be abandoned in favor of the more public-friendly new environmentalism. Old environmentalism, they said, held too great an emphasis on the protection of places. With the rising global climate crisis, they said, the environmental justice approach of protecting places was too small to actually work. They introduced the idea of "politics as possibility," that institutional and political changes should be feasible and understood by the public. Old notions of environmental justice were too localized to be of any practical use.
The play between environmental justice and environmental humanities is fraught with arguments like this one. Hard sciences and social sciences are thought by many to be too fundamentally different to be compatible, but Sze thinks that the solution to global environmental crises lies in "balancing ways of knowing," that is, compromising from both sides to find a scientifically-sound solution that can be supported by the public.
-- by Patrick Dunn '12
Sze emphasized that her use of the word "crossroads" in the title of her lecture was intentional. A metaphorical crossroads is exactly what environmental justice and environmental humanities have recently come to. The crossroads is important, symbolically, because it shows that the two fields overlap quite often and have congruities, but at the same time are often seen as incompatible and contradictory. The traditional meaning of crossroads has negative connotations of conflict.
Environmental justice has been around since the 1980s, when both social and environmental activists began talking about "environmental racism," a phenomenon characterized by disproportionate impacts of pollution and government protection on lower classes and minorities. The movement gained momentum in 1994 when an executive order was passed directing that impacts of pollution on minorities had to be examined. Though the discourse on environmental justice has grown considerably of late, the problem is far from being solved. Poor urban neighborhoods are still feeling the effects of pollution worse than the upper and middle classes. Today in New York City, one in four black children have asthma, but the national average for children is only 6 percent.
One of Sze's main goals as an environmental humanist is to increase people's cultural recognition of the environmental problems that plague our society. This is where environmental humanities come into play. Environmental humanities are a window into environmentalism for the layman who doesn't know a lot about the science behind environmentalism. Environmental humanities open environmentalism to a public forum, because the humanities are a social science that has real-life implications that the public can recognize.
One particular study in environmental humanities was done by two pollsters, who called their proposal, "Death of Environmentalism." In "Death of Environmentalism," the two men outlined that in order to move forward, old environmentalism must be abandoned in favor of the more public-friendly new environmentalism. Old environmentalism, they said, held too great an emphasis on the protection of places. With the rising global climate crisis, they said, the environmental justice approach of protecting places was too small to actually work. They introduced the idea of "politics as possibility," that institutional and political changes should be feasible and understood by the public. Old notions of environmental justice were too localized to be of any practical use.
The play between environmental justice and environmental humanities is fraught with arguments like this one. Hard sciences and social sciences are thought by many to be too fundamentally different to be compatible, but Sze thinks that the solution to global environmental crises lies in "balancing ways of knowing," that is, compromising from both sides to find a scientifically-sound solution that can be supported by the public.
-- by Patrick Dunn '12
